Therefore I Am
by AotA
Summary: Prowl is human, Jazz is… not. And Prowl thinks that it should probably be the other way around.
1. Chapter 1

Title: …Therefore I Am

Summary: Prowl is human, Jazz is… not. And Prowl thinks that it should probably be the other way around.

Notes: A would-be Transformers/Ghost in the Shell fusion. Part 1 of 2.

xXxXxXxXxXx

Prowl carefully ignored the carelessly muffled whispers and rude stares of two of his coworkers as Jazz gave a discontent growl, as though in his ear. It was something that he had gotten used to. Whispers, stares, and Jazz's inevitable snarls in response. The door shut silently behind him, blocking the both of them from sight, and Prowl let out an equally silent sigh.

"Frag it, Prowl. I just can't stand how you let those wastes of space do that, day, after day, after day… Ever since you were outed as a cyborg they just stare at you like something they'd see in a zoo. It's not right."

Prowl's eyes narrowed lightly, as though guarding themselves against the sudden glare of headlights, even though his optical input compensated immediately. Though his mouth didn't move, he replied with a dull, "It is pointless to show a reaction, or protest, Jazz."

Jazz was silent for a long moment, "I just wish… I could get them to stop, since you won't do anything."

"Not possible," Prowl replied, a tinge of something mournful in those unvoiced words.

Jazz let a long sigh wash over the both of them, "I know, I know. It still sucks though."

"I would be… pleased," Prowl replied, "if you _were_ able to do so, though I would still request that you refrain. My statement as to the pointlessness still stands, but I would be, glad."

"Heh," Jazz let out a breath of a laugh, "Thanks, Prowl. You don't know how much that means to me."

Prowl's mouth tightened slightly. "…I'm sure I do not, Jazz." He looked up at the night sky, dark clouds and the light pollution of the city blocking out all but the brightest of stars. "I am sure I do not," he repeated out loud, voice drowned out by the wail of sirens, the splash of tires in puddles, and purr of vehicles, the clamor of the millions of voices that resided in the city.

Jazz was more human that he was, Prowl reflected as the door opened behind him and he was nearly knocked over.

Neither of them apologized and the other man simply went on his way. Prowl straightened his coat and slid his hands into his pockets. He felt the lightest of sprinkles against his cheek, but Prowl didn't care.

It was going to rain again.

It was ironic, but Prowl would be the first to admit that the AI was more human than the human who owned the "artificial" intelligence. By the same token that named Jazz as an artificial _thing_ would never allow him to be a person by law.

After all, "Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

To the ones who believed that… Jazz was nothing more than a fancy bit of programming, whose inputs and outputs gave him a mere facsimile of life, a simulation of being.

He didn't give a damn about the Chinese room argument. To him, it was the same as the argument surrounding the existence of the human soul. Did they have one? Did they comprehend? Did they understand?

…or were they simply so much meat?

Prowl wasn't sure about either. Nor did he care. Maybe he had a soul. Maybe he didn't. Maybe Jazz didn't understand anything, and simply functioned by the order of inputs and outputs. Maybe he understood. Maybe Jazz was the one with a soul and humans were meat puppets.

Maybe…

"…Prowl? You okay?"

Prowl's lips quirked slightly, "I'm fine."

What did it matter?

Maybe they were all nothing but the dream of some higher being. How could they know?

The answer was simple: they couldn't, not beyond the tenuous strands of faith.

Prowl strolled down the street, letting Jazz stream music through his head and chatter about this and that.

When the rain began pouring down, the aloof smile on his face stayed firmly in place as he walked down the emptying streets, all the color drained from the landscape and buildings gray looming.

xXxXxXxXxXx

Jazz murmured a quiet goodnight to his owner as he settled down for sleep. Prowl was pushing it again, Jazz though unhappily. It wasn't healthy to get so little down time. For all that Prowl's body was completely artificial on down to his brain case, the man wasn't an inexhaustible machine, no matter how much he liked to pretend he was.

His coworkers, Jazz thought with disgust, took greedy advantage of Prowl's willingness to work till he was blind and further. It was sickening, but it was familiar.

Prowl expected the kind of treatment he was being faced with.

Jazz crooned a quiet melody to his owner, knowing that it relaxed him even though his conscious mind was absent.

He just had to wait a little longer and Jazz would stop their callous abuse of Prowl's abilities.

"Just a little while longer," Jazz murmured, "then I'll take care of it. I'll take care of everything." He imagined running fingers through Prowl's short white hair and wondered what it might feel like.

After a long moment, Jazz quietly withdrew and ventured out into the 'net. There were things that he had to keep a metaphorical eye on if he wanted everything to go smoothly.

He didn't want to cause trouble for Prowl, and that is what would happen if he didn't do this right.

Jazz felt a worrisome feeling at leaving Prowl without a word. He didn't want to, but it was necessary.

He would just have to make sure he got back before Prowl woke up. He wouldn't forgive himself if he was the one to cause Prowl distress, but he also couldn't afford to hurry.

It was a dilemma that he would be glad to be done with, Jazz knew.

Massive amounts of information in the form of templates, heuristics, sensory data, interpretive programming poured through him as he did the final checks. It was so close to being done, Jazz's thought form quivered with nervous anticipation but he held himself back.

Just a little longer, Jazz told himself.

Just a little longer…


	2. Chapter 2

Title: ...Therefore I Am - Chapter 2  
>Author: AotA<br>Rating: K  
>Characters: Jazz<br>Summary: Prowl is human, Jazz is... not. And Prowl thinks that it should probably be the other way around.  
>Notes: One last part to go. I am <em>not<em> going to let myself be suckered into writing more than that. Don't even try. I've got my eyes on you sneaky fraggers. :|

* * *

><p>Jazz wended his way into the brand new shell, testing it as he went, feeling the differences between what he knew was <em>Prowl<em> and what he had designed. He had finally completed it, after a lot of indecision on what he wanted to external appearance to be before deciding that as long as it didn't fall into the realm of "uncanny valley" or "hideously ugly"—both of which he had researched very carefully _and_ surreptitiously polled the humans who felt those thing at a "gut" level that he would probably never understand—though he thought that Prowl wouldn't care one way or the other. _Jazz_ wanted to look _real_ for Prowl though, because the cyborg cared about so few things—he didn't care about this either, Jazz knew—it was the least he could do, even if Prowl didn't know.

Settling in, slaving the hardware to his consciousness via the heavily modified, faux braincase, Jazz turned on the visor he'd fashioned out of a very thin, very densely packed photoreceptive material which was then sandwiched between two layers of extremely strong, clear, _scratch resistant_ plastic and connected directly to the optical center of Jazz's brand new "brain". Jazz had had plenty of experience looking out into the physical world through Prowl's "realistically human" cyborg eyes and it wasn't exactly his preferred mode of visual input.

It had made him feel oddly claustrophobic when he closed off other senses and just looked through those two optics. Claustrophobia, if such a diagnosis could even be applied to a purely digital intelligence such as himself. It wasn't entirely surprising, because Jazz had always had eyes and cameras everywhere. He would still have those eyes, but if he got cut off from them, as it was now a real possibility, he would be essentially _blind_, so he had slowly accustomed himself to learning to cope with the restricted viewpoint.

After spending several minutes to reorient himself, Jazz propped himself up, movements still a little jerky.

He held up the human—cyborg—hand in front of his optics—optics that he could see out of, optics that belonged to him—with a few jerky motions that he immediately devoted processor power to smoothing out, to look more natural, despite the fact that it was completely unnatural for a being that had come to life as a small bundle of recursive programming that grew and learned until _it_ was a _he_, and _he_ named himself _Jazz_.

It was _his_ hand that he was moving. It was _his_ optics he was seeing out of.

He curled the fingers curiously, watching them as they moved to his instructions. Mocha skin stretched and creased in a way that was fascinating despite the fact that he knew every centimeter of the body he had constructed.

It was honestly amazing. Thrilling. It was a sensation of intrigue and aliveness that he wanted to share with Prowl. That sense of _being alive_ that Prowl always felt so distant from, as if he were seeing the world in shades of gray, rather than the brilliant shades Jazz knew it could be. Jazz wanted Prowl to know and share in the sheer _joy_ that Jazz felt, had felt, would continue to feel, so long as he had Prowl to talk to, to engage that amazing human mind that was genius... and _isolated_.

With that thought in mind, with the need to _move_, he swung _his_ feet down off the table, feeling slightly giddy as they told him that the floor was _cold_, the simple temperature differential creating sensations that were translated by the protocols that should have been translating information into an organic format into something unique and as beautiful as it was strange to an AI that had never felt its like before.

It was _his_ skin—wired with kilometers of tiny, tiny wires and sensors—that told him what his body was feeling.

He curiously moved his feet, testing the sensations curiously, bouncing his heels, tapping his toes, rolling his foot back and forth, side to side, testing commands and function and limitation. Pressing against the limits, and breaking them, was _Jazz_. It was what had made him _more_ than just another AI.

Stiff. That was Jazz's verdict. But that was okay. He could work on that. It wasn't any actual design flaw, just something that needed to be worked up to so he could reach the estimated specifications of the body he had designed. Then he would go _beyond_. Because he was Jazz, and that was what Jazz did. Was created to do.

Carefully, he set his weight down on those bare, synthskin covered feet and stood up. He turned his head, heavy braided locks of hair that were wrapped around sensitive antenna fell over his shoulder, startling him. He raised his hand and touched the black "hair" curiously for a moment before he turned his attention back to the table that he had built this body upon.

He was _standing_.

Jazz laughed—synthetic lungs expanding and contracting as an artificial diaphragm sent spasms through his frame in a way that was disorienting but _good_—realizing that this was it, and heard his voice with his own audio receptors, his own ears for the first time.

It was a deep voice, as his voice had always been translated smoothly into Prowl's ears, but there was _more_ of it, as the sounds echoed and rebounded in the room and vibrated from his throat and came back to his ears in a way that was entirely different from the way he had listened to the world from sterile online connections and mics.

It was the sound of _life_.

And it was a music all of its own to his ears.

Jazz took his first step and his fingers touched fabric—a shirt: white, with a simple blue and red stripe running down it, cotton, soft, light—he lifted it up, looked at it with his optics, his eyes for the first time. A pair of black sweats with white athletic lines was under the shirt.

Jazz gingerly—awkwardly—maneuvered the shirt on, catching the shirt on still ungainly fingers and arms, getting it stuck on his optical visor—claustrophobia rising when the lack of sight capabilities frightening him when he couldn't seem to—and on the right way.

He balanced himself against the table as he carefully pulled on the sweats, and socks, and shoes, and finally felt quite stiffled by the unanticipated reduction in sensor readings.

Jazz ran his hands down his front, feeling the way his hands touched the shirt, and the shirt touched his hands and his chest, and his hand touched his chest through his shirt.

He dropped his hand when an alert reminded him that he needed to go.

He wouldn't let Prowl wake up without him there.

Jazz had always been there for him, and he wasn't going to let this new thing start off with the bad associations of Jazz-not-being-there for Prowl. Not when all of it had been so Jazz could do just that.

He took an awkward step, adjusted for the difference between wearing shoes and not, then he took another, and recalbrated again, and repeated the cycle over and over until he was smoothly walking through the door, hand reaching out and grabbing the wallet that held his new identity and put it in his pocket in one smooth motion.

He playfully kicked the door to the room closed and with a command to the networks that were his and his alone, he locked everything down.

Jazz grinned, white teeth flashing in the gloom as his visor glowed.

Do it with style, or don't bother doing it.

Jazz chuckled and left the place of his embodiment behind, slipping into the cab that he'd arranged to have waiting.

"Jazz, right?" the cabbie asked, peering at him from around his seat.

"That's me," Jazz said with a half smile as he carefully assumed a casual posture to set the man at ease.

"Lennox Park?" the man asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow as he eyed Jazz up and down, "Sure that's where you want to go?"

"I'm sure, man," Jazz smiled, "Go ahead."

The cabbie snorted, "It's no skin off of my nose." He started the engine up and peeled away from the curb.

Jazz leaned back.

This was it.


End file.
